Just over four months ago, Sun's chief open source strategist, Ian Murdock, revealed the first details of plans for an open source variant of Sun's Solaris operating system. Now the first developer version has been released.

The driver project launched by kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman doesn't have enough hardware to work on. Although the Linux Driver project has enough developers, they aren't all working at full capacity, says Kroah-Hartman in his blog.

Back at the Kernel Summit in September Andi Kleen announced that he would no longer be maintaining the i386 and x86_64 branches if they were merged in the new x86 branch. A new patch shows that Kleen has kept his promise.

Manufacturers of embedded systems are choosing Linux more often than any other operating system; and the trend looks likely to continue, according to a forecast by market researchers Venture Development Corporation (VDC).